PwC is set to announce a new super-charged diversity program within weeks, led by newly appointed chief diversity officer
Marcus Laithwaite
. Its ratio of female partners has been static for two years at 17 per cent.

KPMG chief executive
Gray ­Wingrove
wants a quarter of the firm’s partners to be women by 2016, up from 19 per cent.

There are also signs Grant Thornton wants to trampoline itself off the lower rungs of the diversity ladder. Currently, only 9 per cent of Grant Thornton’s equity partners are women, among the lowest of the Big Six accountancy firms, and a far cry from its nemesis BDO.

Vocal support for diversity needed

The topic got a lot of air time at Grant ­Thornton’s national partner ­conference last weekend when 80 per cent of the firm’s largely male partners agreed that having senior executives showing more vocal support for diversity could make the biggest difference to the firm’s financial performance.

Meanwhile, a new truth has dawned on human resources leaders in big professional services firms: that sponsorship is more crucial to the success of hitting diversity targets than carefully crafted mentoring programs.

“Mentoring is someone talking to you about you. Sponsorship is someone talking about you to others," said KPMG head of human resources
Susan Ferrier
.

This realisation has seen several large firms, including KPMG and Grant Thornton, shift the attention of their programs in a bid to improve senior female and ethnic representation.

Some feel sponsorship is an organic process, but others insist it needs to be “forced" to capture employees that do not fit the mould. “People who are less confident and have more barriers, like childcare, that stop them from participating in informal networking, will always be overlooked," said
Kate Mills
, chief executive of professionalmums.net, a ­recruitment hub for working mothers in law and accounting.

Telstra
director and former
­Microsoft
boss
Steve Vamos
– an avid sponsor of women in business – agrees, but also feels “extrinsic" programs that do not also address intrinsic biases, will have limited success.

“Rules and targets are less likely to institute change because they change what you do, but not how you think," Mr Vamos said.

Such programs are not new, but are still not widely implemented.

Tech giant
IBM
ran a program in the 1990s exposing male executives to their bias. Mr Vamos was one of them.

The process taught him that while juggling a career and raising a family was a big job, it was not for him to decide on if and how it should be done.

“It’s not for me to make that judgement. It’s a woman’s choice," Mr Vamos said.